• 0 Posts
  • 87 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle






  • The part that isn’t mentioned in this article is the onus of marketing. Now that anyone can self publish with almost no overhead, more than a million books are published every year. How many of those even get noticed? Sometimes it feels like people see the same 10-20 books on the bestseller list (which is gameable btw) and think that’s all there is to read.

    These days, traditional publishers don’t do any marketing on behalf of authors unless they feel it’s a sure thing, similar to how they give out advances. If you are already famous or have large social media following, you’re far more likely to get an advance or a marketing effort. Everyone who self publishes, and even most who are traditionally published, have to do their own marketing. Most writers are not marketers, and this is where they fail, no matter how good their book might be.

    Personally, I think the big publishers will collapse soon and the whole industry might move to a subscription model ala Spotify. That would probably be worse for writers, but no one seems to be able to come up with a solution that makes book writing a more viable career.










  • I see your confusion. They could have worded this better, but it’s two grants being split between eight nonprofit financial institutions. My understanding is these entities will lend that money to communities to do ongoing infrastructure projects. The goal is “turning $20 billion of public funds into $150 billion of public and private investment to maximize the impact of public funds.” I don’t know how that part works exactly, but to me that doesn’t sound like a handout. Of course I would hope they would be held responsible for any mismanagement.

    As for why they need to create a financial nework to do this: These kinds of projects can take many years and sometimes need ongoing financing. Apparently, when Obama tried to fund something like this, there was a lending bottleneck where I guess banks didn’t want to finance community infrastructure projects or something, so a lot of the funding just sat there until the grants expired. This is supposed to prevent that from happening.